Art Talk at Cade Tompkins Projects

http://www.cadetompkins.com/artists/william-allen/

Art talk

Thanks. Cade has a good eye, a
big heart, and sound business sense. She is willing to take a risk. She's been
a fierce supporter of this off-beat work. She must have been 21 when we met,
and she had the same good eye and sound sense then. She's been a part of every
phase of my work. Thanks also to Allison for her incredible attention to detail
and creative support. And to you for coming. It is a real pleasure and rare
opportunity for me, who works a lot in a real‐world job, to celebrate and
share this work.

1. What it's about. I
just picked up Huck Finn. Twain's first note says anyone looking for meaning
there should be prosecuted; someone looking for a moral should be banished;
someone looking for a plot should be shot.

This handwriting on the
Wall - it's all an endless landscape.
It's about negotiating a private universe and public engagement. Or maybe how
to titillate. It's about pilgrimage, found sound, raggedy haiku, concrete
poetry-visualizing language. Imagism, advertising not products but processes of
thought. I call it ecphrasis, where image and word go hand in hand. Assonance
(that's being asinine with vowels) and alliteration. Mental maps.

Just-lists. Naming for the
sheer joy of it. The first writing involved Assyrian ledgers of accounts, for
flax, sheep, wheat, stone. I'm just listing the prices of being human in a
geography of the imagination. I'm just trying to stop making sense, yet build a
framework for you to compose a story out of fragments, artifacts, or data.

3. Collaboration. Love
to collaborate! With Group matierla form the early 80’s onwards, to planting
trees for documetna 8 in Kassel, Germany (with Barbara!). To Endless Landscapes
with Birgit Jensen, Jochen Saueracker, and abrara Westermann.With many people who are here: Cade, who's
introduced many readings and supported the work, including with Kathleen Hughes
at White Electric Coffee, with Thomas Palmer on Rose Island in a real estate
show with Lisa Perez, poetry and art with Brian Burt and Irene Lawrence. My
partner in crime Barbara--so many times, and in these Endless Landscapes and
Three Pillows.

4. Form. Form makes a space to
create, to be sloppy and colorful and funny. I took up the Seven Deadly Sins
from Chaucer, assigned each one to a first-term Bush cabinet member, to write
out a narrative that exactly fit a wooden grid about the incursion in Iraq. Later
those texts, defined be arbitrary edges, magically became perfectly working
poems. All multiples of seven.

In 21 Stations, a 21 poem
set of 21-line poems (I call them sonnets-and-a-half), it turned out that it
took exactly the same time to read one poem as it took to journey from one
subway station to the next. Lists of names are endless, so I make constraints…
and build a story from found objects.

My manifesto is
INCIDENTALISM--not accidentalism, not scatter art, not coincidence. In software
we call this incremental change control. I let things find me, but I apply a
gestural, private signature through handwriting to keep it distinctly other
than mechanical or digital reproduction. Really like a scribe with an
illuminated script. The goal is to stave off information overload.

5. Stories. Mysterious loops
in time. My Chad Did painting, now
working with a guy in Chad to support our Country Office in the Central African
Republic, with its enormous challenges in democratic governance, resource
management, poverty, civil strife and education.

My mom's mom was an artist
who liked to sketch trees, historical houses, and make maps. Which is what all
these are... I showed her an early print of words on zinc, and she honed in on
my phrase Horse Piss and eagerly
added, you should have named it Hospice.
But she was really into it!

I moved to New York City to
be a painter. In a tiny studio in the East Village I was making little
typewriter poems like Carl Andre or Apollinaire, when I met Galway Kinnell, who
saw in me some poetry. I also met Cade, Barbara, Norman then poetry, prints,
and painting found an active three-decade dialogue. I couldn't keep them
straight.

I fell in love with John
Adamson's handwriting in first grade. We drew endless battles of Shiloh,
Antietam, and Gettysburg, and we named every hillock and gulley and rebel on
our maps.

I emailed the International
Planetary Nomenclature Society to ask how they named craters on moons of
planets. All very systematic. Since Pluto's moon Charon had been assigned a
category (underworld deities) but the craters were not yet named, I got to do
it myself: Ixion, Vesuvius, Rhadamanthus. [Mercury - artists names like
Flaubert, Ibsen, Charles Ives]

7. What's next? Good
Fish-Bad Fish, Just Discovered species, Galaxies. Still working on Berlin
subway mapping poem. I wonder if you have questions about the work. What do you
think? I hope the paintings speak louder than words. Maybe Barbara would say a
few words about Endless Landscapes.